Fatou Diallo

Fatou Diallo is a Partner at Sahel Capital, an Africa-focused growth equity fund with offices in Dakar and London. Sahel Capital invests across West and East Africa in growth-stage companies in the fintech, agritech, and consumer-goods sectors. She joined as a Principal six years ago, was promoted to Partner three years later, and now leads the fintech vertical. She sits on the boards of five portfolio companies across Nigeria, Kenya, Senegal, and Cote d'Ivoire.

Her training was on the structured products desk at Goldman Sachs in London for seven years, working initially on credit derivatives and later on hybrid securities. She did an MBA at INSEAD between her associate and VP years. Before Goldman she did an MSc in Mathematics at Cambridge. Before Cambridge she graduated top of her year from the University of Dakar mathematics program.

Her mentor focus is venture capital and growth equity from both sides of the table. For founders raising Series A through Series C she works on the deck, the financial model, the term sheet, and the long arc of fund-relationship management. For operators considering a move into investing she works on the skill-transferability assessment, the search strategy, and the specific dynamics of breaking into the African investment ecosystem from the operator side. For early-career investment professionals she works on the long arc — associate to principal to partner — and the specific patterns that differentiate the careers that progress from those that stall.

Mentees who book with Fatou come from three primary populations. First: African founders preparing for institutional fundraising rounds. They typically arrive with a deck, a model, and specific investor conversations either in progress or being prepared. The session works the deck and the model and the investor strategy. Second: senior operators in finance, consulting, banking, or technology who are considering a transition into venture capital, growth equity, or fund management. The session assesses fit and works the search strategy. Third: associate-level and principal-level investment professionals at African and African-focused funds who want senior peer perspective on their current trajectory.

She will not coddle a deck. She will help fix it. The mentor interaction is direct and the specific feedback is the value. Mentees who arrive expecting affirmation will not get it. Mentees who arrive expecting honest professional assessment will get it and will leave with a clear list of revisions and follow-up work.

Outside her direct fund work she is on the investment committee of two early-stage Africa-focused funds led by other Black women General Partners, in a slot that is structured as limited-partner advisory rather than as direct investment responsibility. She is on the advisory board of an African-women-in-finance pipeline organization that places early-career investment professionals into entry positions at African and African-focused funds. She is a frequent panelist at the African Venture Capital Association annual meetings and at adjacent industry conferences in London, New York, and Lagos.

Her published work consists of an annual fund letter that has become an industry-read document for its plain analysis of the African growth-equity landscape, several op-eds in the Financial Times and African Business on the regulatory environment for African private capital, and a chapter in an industry handbook on growth-equity investing in emerging markets. She does not maintain a Substack or active LinkedIn posting cadence; the public-writing work is selective.

She is a member of the Finance, Investing and Wealth network here and serves as one of the rotating member-facilitators of the private-markets subgroup. She mentors actively inside the African Women in Tech Leadership network for engineering-leaders contemplating moves into corporate-development, venture-capital, or operator-investor roles.

Sessions are 45 minutes. The pre-session brief for founders is the deck and the financial model. The pre-session brief for operators considering a transition is a CV and a one-page statement of search parameters. The pre-session brief for early-career investment professionals is the current portfolio under their direct responsibility and a specific situation they want to discuss. Sessions structure themselves around the brief. Mentees leave with a written list of specific revisions, contacts to make, and decisions to take in the immediate term. Follow-up sessions are encouraged for founders working through an active raise across multiple investor conversations.

Her perspective on the African venture and growth-equity market is sharp. The market has moved through several waves across the past decade. The fintech wave that crested between 2020 and 2022 has matured into a more disciplined investment environment with smaller round sizes, more rigorous diligence, and longer paths to follow-on funding. The agritech and climate-adaptation theses have grown. The consumer-internet theses have contracted. The founder population has continued to deepen and the institutional-investor population has consolidated. She mentors with this landscape in mind and helps mentees calibrate their fundraising approach to the current rather than the trailing market.

On the diversity-of-capital question she is explicit. African venture capital has made measurable progress in seeing more Black women General Partners across the past five years and has made significantly less progress in directing capital to Black-woman-led portfolio companies in proportion. She is on the investment committee of two funds led by Black women specifically because she believes the capital-direction question is now where the work matters. Mentees who book with her get access to perspective on this structural question alongside the specific deck and term-sheet work.

Her engagement in the platform's Finance, Investing and Wealth network includes serving as a rotating member-facilitator of the private-markets subgroup and contributing to discussion threads on the topics of African venture capital, growth equity, and the specific structural conditions in pan-African investing. She has also hosted the platform's Founder Fundraising Clinic event for seed-to-Series-A founders, which has run multiple times and has produced specific deck and term-sheet reviews for attending founders. Mentees who have attended report that the event session quality is consistent with the one-on-one mentor practice.

The finance-and-investing landscape continues to evolve in ways that affect Black women operators and investors specifically. The compensation-banding work at the senior partner and managing-director level has documented patterns of disadvantage. The Black-woman-led fund data continues to show small percentages of total assets under management. The structural work remains real and ongoing. The mentor practice connects specifically to the senior-level structural questions and to the deal-flow and portfolio-decision specifics that determine whether individual careers progress at parity.

The platform's mentor infrastructure is designed to support the kind of long-arc mentorship that African and African-diaspora women have historically had to build informally across years and decades. The structured booking, the prepared briefs, the in-session discipline, and the post-session follow-up documentation make the mentor exchange durable in a way that informal conversations across career-arc moments often are not. Mentees who engage with the structure benefit from the discipline; the mentor practice benefits from the structure too because it permits sustained engagement across many mentees without the time-overhead of informal arrangement.